Outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Friday declassified a set of internal intelligence slides documenting a long-running US program that has funded a worldwide network of biolabs that handle dangerous pathogens – including dozens in Ukraine.
Gabbard, who is set to leave her post at the ene of this month, said that the documents are “new evidence of longstanding United States government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries,” with over 40 of those in Ukraine, adding that this information has been “knowingly withheld from the American people.” She accused US officials, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Biden administration’s national security team, of having “lied to the American people about the existence” of the labs.
“Now, despite the obvious potential for catastrophic global impact that research on dangerous pathogens in biolabs can have, politicians and so-called health professionals like Dr. Fauci, as well as entities within the Biden administration’s national security team, lied repeatedly to the American people about the existence of U.S.-funded and supported biolabs,” Gabbard said, adding “Not only did they lie, they threatened those who attempted to expose the truth.”
The slides, declassified April 23 and released Friday, describe facilities supported under the Defense Department’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program, a post-Cold War effort begun in the 1990s to secure pathogens and weapons materials left over from the Soviet Union. In Ukraine, the program has operated since 2005, investing roughly $200 million to upgrade Ukrainian-run public-health and veterinary labs, according to Pentagon fact sheets. One newly declassified slide reflects a prior intelligence assessment that a veterinary lab in Kharkiv likely held dangerous pathogens and was vulnerable to Russian seizure or damage.
Gabbard tied the release to Executive Order 14292, which President Trump signed in May 2025 to end federal funding of gain-of-function research, and said she had directed the intelligence community to step up collection on the labs. The release is part of a wave of declassifications in her final weeks; an ODNI official has said she is working to release documents on the origins of COVID-19 before her departure.
The existence of the U.S.-funded labs has been public for years: the Pentagon published fact sheets on the program, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv described it in 2020, and Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland acknowledged Ukraine’s “biological research facilities” in Senate testimony in March 2022 – in what Glenn Greenwald framed at the time as “with palpable pen-twirling discomfort and in halting speech, a glaring contrast to her normally cocky style of speaking in obfuscatory State Department officialese – acknowledged: “uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research facilities.” Any hope to depict such “facilities” as benign or banal was immediately destroyed by the warning she quickly added: “we are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach”
Awkward…
